"Goodbye Google" he says he got fed up

Douglas Bowman, visual design lead at Google, says he’s leaving the company because an obsessive, engineer-heavy, data driven-culture made it impossible for him to work there anymore.

After nearly three years at Google, where he built the design team that remains, Bowman admits that he does have something else lined up. But in a candid blog post headlined "Goodbye Google" he says he got fed up with constant pushback from a bureaucracy that seeks empirical justifications for choices made within what is essentially is an art form — and often about relatively insignificant details.

"I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case," said Bowman. "I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

He also brings up an anecdote mentioned in a recent New York Times article on Google's vice president of search and user experience, Marissa Mayer, where Google couldn’t decide between two blue colors and — so they conducted testing of 41 shades to see which performed better.

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